Pickles come with controversy. Diners tend to have strong feelings about tunafish salad sandwiches, especially whether to add pickles and relish – or not. One good friend of ours, Rory Olsen, loved tunafish salad. It was the only sandwich she ordered in restaurants. But she always asked – Does your tunafish have relish or pickles?

Turns out, President Barack Obama prefers the pickles in his tunafish salad, at least when he was a young college student living in New York City: “He loved to make ginger beef and tuna-fish sandwiches made the way his grandfather had taught him, with finely chopped dill pickles, writes [David] Maraniss in the biography Barack Obama: The Story.

There are loads of receipes for tunafish salad, with pickles or not, including many at Yummly.com. Which do you prefer?

And don’t forget, the big secret to a great tunafish sandwich is mashing the tuna with mayonnaise for a long, long time and chilling it well. And of course, using St. Jude Albacore!